IPv6 still broken in 2019 - please delete your AAAA records until it can be resolved

Daniel R.

30 Jan, 2019 04:51 PM

Hello,

I found this thread after a frustrating apparent "outage" which turned out to just be this same issue that's been intermittently plaguing rubygems for at least the last year: http://help.rubygems.org/discussions/problems/31074-timeout-error - The thread was closed with a promise of addressing it elsewhere but no indication of where to go for updates for those impacted.

I'm not asking for the maintainers of api.rubygems.org to support IPv6, but I am begging you to please just delete your AAAA records and have the hostname become ipv4 only until such time as you're willing and able to actually support ipv6 and also to add its connectivity status to the status page as well. Maintaining broken ipv6 support when the ruby HTTP client "gem" uses cannot fall back is breaking people's stuff - and ipv6 is enabled by default now on all OSs that I know of. Forcing users to disable their own ipv6 stack to get Rubygems working is also a bad solution because it means that anything people use that does need ipv6 can't use that without switching it on and off constantly.

I understand from another recent thread that the project maintainers have every reason to believe the root cause isn't with the project's own setup, but just as you would take action if large parts of the Internet were unable to reach you over ipv4 even if it was your hosting provider's fault, I'd argue the fact that much of the Internet reproducibly can't reach you on ipv6 is a real problem which needs to be solved in the short term, not just met with a "huh, that's weird, works fine for me."

There is no downside I'm aware of at this point to removing the AAAA records on this hostname - while every major OS enables ipv6 by default, none of them disable ipv4 by default so you would be making the service available for many more people by dropping the AAAA records until the issue with your upstream service providers is resolved.